Tamarind suffers a brief bout of level-80-phobia. Anyone else find themselves curiously reluctant to actually get to max level once it’s practically within reach? I know I often coast the last level or so, maybe a last ditch attempt to string the levelling game out for as long as possible.

The Escapist reports that a guy in the UK (oh why am I not surprised?) has written a boot fetish version of Pong, the venerable old console game. The boot is actually the controller, you have to grope and fondle it to play the game …

On a not very similar theme, Adele Caelia talks at BrightHub about embarrassing mistells and other ways in which sex can be entertaining in gaming. Well, she says embarrassing but I say there are few more hilarious things in MMOs than a totally inappropriate mistell. (Random factoid: mistells used to be known as ‘mavs’ in MUSH, named after a particularly notorious player called Mav.)

Naamah@Aionic Thoughts (a blog you really should be following if you’re into Aion) asks when Mass-PvP becomes a zergfest, and whether one is more fun than the other.

Andrew Douell, a roguelike developer, posts a very smart article about narrative in games and how some narrative tricks from other media just don’t work. I’m particularly taken by his observation that you can’t tell a story well with repeated play (eg. I killed an orc, then I killed an orc, then I killed an orc isn’t a very interesting story.)

Syp writes about all the MMOs he could have tried but didn’t, and explains why not. I never played EQ because the only person I knew who played was a really annoying dork and he was really scarily obsessively into it. I knew if I tried it I’d be stuck talking to him any time we were in the same room.

I think that post caught my eye because most players and devs just don’t think about that kind of issue, most MMOs don’t really give players enough agency to create their own history in a meaningful way.

But from my personal experience in MUSHes, it was an incredibly important issue for us. We needed to find ways for new players to come in and be able to quickly catch up with what had been going on, and for players to be able to record their own personal character histories and update them as time went on. We never found a good solution (but we did find lots of additional problems :) ). It’s basically the same problem as keeping new players up to date with what the current best builds are and which old content has been deprecated — if you let players act as historians and give them a wiki, what when they get bored or behind with updating? what if only the biased players write the history etc?

It is a fascinating issue. And like I say, I haven’t seen anyone really talk about it.

Not that I’m playing anymore (not that it stops me thinking about coming back) but I was talking with an RL friend who I played WoW with on point number 11, but we were thinking more of a Tron like version where the players get sucked into the game and become their characters. I think it would be hilarious personally, maybe I should resub, grab Fraps and do it!